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This is true, but bad codebases are inherently hard and dangerous to change. That's one of the properties of them being bad.
by skrtskrt 6y ago
This is true, but bad codebases are inherently hard and dangerous to change. That's one of the properties of them being bad.
- aequitas 6y agoThat's why creating a new codebase is not the solution per se. Understanding the old codebase and putting its behaviour under test should be the first step. Only then you can start working on a new codebase, compare its behaviour to the old one and call it an improvement (if you manage to not mess it up as well, which is sadly often the case). Of course this can (and should often) be done is stages and not as a whole.
- skrtskrt 6y agoAgreed, whether you rewrite or change in-place you're not going to be confident in the outcome unless you have tons of end to end tests first. Then you need to find and skip/ignore the tests that don't actually test end-to-end behavior or business logic, just some implementation detail along the way. Only then will you be free to do what is probably the first step if you have a crappy codebase: start establishing domain boundaries and interfaces and splitting things across those lines.